APA Blogs

The most important aspect of companies investing in the skills of tomorrow is to avoid a spiralling skills crisis. One of the main reasons to write a post on this subject is because of the numerous companies who place zero importance on training their staff or providing the opportunity to improve their skills.

Of course this training could prove expensive for companies, yet it is usually in their best interest. Not all staff within the AP department would be eligible for training, but training schedules, incentives and other strategies could be

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a buzz word for some time now, but it’s becoming more and more interesting in the accounts payable realm. It is literally changing the future of AP with some exceptional results such as improved efficiency, smoother processing of accounts, quicker processing times and additional data insights to name a few. And more productive and engaged staff members is just one of the trends we are beginning to see in companies increasingly implementing AI within their AP departments.

How many times have you said to yourself, “I can do better than this”, or, “Surely there is a faster way to move my career forward”… Many of us have had these or similar thoughts about our careers. Sunday evening dread? Monday morning blues? Unfortunately it’s a real thing for so many of us!

What if there was a quicker way to move up the career ladder? A way to fast track the years that are usually required to gain experience in each role before being offered promotions or moving into

The conference kicked off with an enthusiastic welcome by Jamie Radford, addressing the room of an amazing 220 delegates – 3 times as many attendees as last year! This only goes to prove how important conferences like this are. As the leading accounts payable resource in the UK, Accounts Payable Association will continue to provide industry-leading courses and run conferences and other workshops including this APA Conference (which is now CPD accredited and that’s a big step forward for AP Association). The current courses

The move towards implementing robots in businesses can be both frightening and exciting. Many people are scared about what the future holds for work life if robots are able to take over part or all of their job function. Robots can take over various functions but what they can’t do is the cognitive side of what a human can do.

For this reason they will likely never completely take over job roles and humans will always be needed to oversee and complement what robots do. Artificial intelligence is on the move

Over the past few years, there has been a fundamental change in the way the suppliers send their invoices to their customers. Specifically, the sending invoices by email as a PDF. Almost all accounting software provides this capability to do so as standard, it is simply a matter of turning it on.

From the supplier’s perspective, this saves the labour, ink, stationery and postage costs, is much more reliable and adds the additional days to the time available to your customer to pay you on time. As

After an amazingly successful AP Association Annual Conference and Expo this year, we wanted to highlight some of the fantastic comments that we received on the day. I could write a lengthy essay on the day but since there was so much feedback, it was felt that it would be best left to one-word displays and quotes from the many lovely attendees…

If you did not attend the conference but would like to read more about the day’s events, click here to read the round-up. In the meantime, if you attended,

Bitcoin. A word we have all heard so often but a lot of us don’t actually know what it is. Yes, it’s a digital currency that could increase drastically and make us a lot of money. But how does that digital currency actually translate into money? And is it safe to buy? I have heard of friends of friends who have lost thousands – perhaps you have too. The word Bitcoin also often conjures up thoughts of the dark web and either very high returns or very high risk. Let’s

You might be thinking, but isn’t a manager supposed to manage me? Why would I want to manage my manager? A common complaint from employees is about the quality of their management. Also called “managing up”, managing your manager could help you if you’ve ever wished that you could change certain traits in your manager or certain aspects of their management. Believe it or not, the nature of the relationship between employee and manager is not determined only by the manager. There are actually a number of ways you can guide